News

Center News and Notes

Earlier this month, Jean Lane, the conservationist, philanthropist, gardener, and wife of the Center’s benefactor L.W. “Bill” Lane Jr., passed away at the age of 87. Mrs. Lane was a tireless advocate of environmental education and conservation, and an active community presence in her home town of Portola Valley.

What was responsible for the postwar rise of Silicon Valley? The historians Leslie Berlin and David M. Kennedy pondered these questions and persistent myths like that of the “lone inventor” at an event celebrating Berlin’s new book, “Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age.”

The California fires continue to burn at a record-setting pace, the worst of them along the central coast; the danger that Utah’s Great Salt Lake will shrivel into a puddle; Washington’s governor looks to a carbon tax to pay back state reserves that are committed to school costs, and other highlights of environmental news from around the West this week.

Marci Kwon meditated on the fragility of history and the good fortune by which prints and backdrops from a popular Chinatown photo studio have remained accessible – after collectors such as Wylie Wong and George Berticevich rescued them from dumpsters and flea markets. Without them, Kwon said, “May's would be little more than a footnote in the history of San Francisco's Chinatown, if even that.”

This year’s massive West Coast fires have left an expanding list of environmental and political challenges; California gets an early Christmas present as statewide greenhouse gas emissions fall faster than expected; the Supreme Court will not reconsider a decision giving the Agua Caliente tribe groundwater rights; and more of the past week’s best western environmental journalism.